Teen ‘Black Widow’ Identified as Moscow Metro Suicide Bomber

In the wake of the Moscow metro bombings, Russian bloggers were overwhelmingly convinced that their own Special Forces were somehow responsible for the attacks to serve internal interests. However, the identity of one of the two female suicide bombers was just revealed.

This baby-faced seventeen-year-old widow of a high ranking insurgent from Dagestan was identified as the first bomber.

The identity of the second bomber has not yet been officially disclosed, but is said to be a twenty-year-old girl from Chechnya. Both are dubbed as “Black Widows.” There have been at least 16 of these girls in Russian cities, mostly in the early part of the last decade.

The Chechen militant Doku Umarov who took credit for the recent bombings, appointed Dzhanet Abdullayeva’s husband Magomedov as a commander of his organization last spring. On New Year’s Eve, Magomedov was killed in a firefight by Russian federal forces.

Dzhanet Abdullayeva was described as a quiet girl who used to recite poetry at competitions and was likely recruited into insurgency action via internet encouragement and, according to an official at Dagestan’s Interior Ministry, because of the romantic myth of a man with a gun that manages to appeal to young girls in small towns without many men in the first place. |NYT|